Political Events 1960's

Prominent political events

United States

• 1960 - United States presidential eletion, 1960 - The key turning point of the campaign was the series of four Kennedy-Nixon debates; they were the first presidential debates held on television.
• 1961 – Newly elected President John F Kennedy and Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson take office in 1961; Kennedy establishes the Peace Corps.
• 1963 –  Martin Luther King Jr's " I Have a Dream" speech in Washington, D.C. on August 28.
• 1963 - President Lyndon Johnson becomes president and presses for civil rights legislation.
• 1964 – U.S President Lyndon B. Johnson is elected in his own right, defeating United States Senator Barry Goldwater in November.
• 1964 - Civil Rigths Act of 1964 signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson. This landmark piece of legislation in the United States outlawed racial segregation in schools, public places, and employment.
• 1964 - Wilderness Act signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson on September 3.
• 1965 - U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson and Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey take office in January.
• 1965 - National Voting Rights Act of 1965 signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson. Outlawed discriminatory voting practices that had been responsible for the widespread disenfranchisement of African Americans in the United States.
• 1968 – U.S. President Richard M. Nixon is elected defeating Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey in November.
• 1969 – U.S. President Richard Nixon is inaugurated in January 1969; promises "peace with honor" to end the Vietnam War. 

Canada

• The Quiet Revolutin in Quebec altered the province into a more Secular Jean Lesage Liberal government created a welfare state (État-Providence) and fomented the rise of active nationalism among Francophone Québécois society.
• On February 15, 1965, the new maple leaf flag was adopted in Canada, after much acrimonious debate known as the Great flag debate.
• In 1960, the Canadian Bill of Rights becomes law, and Universal suffrage, the right for any Canadian citizen to vote, is finally adopted by John Diefenbaker's Progressive Conservative government. The new election act allows first nations people to vote for the first time.

Europe

• Construction of the Berlin Wall started in 1961.
• British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan delivers his Wind of change speech in 1960.
• Pope John XXIII calls the Second Vatican Council of the Catholic Church , continued by Pope Paul VI which met from October 11, 1962, until December 8, 1965.
• In October 1964, Soviet leader Nikita Khruschev was expelled from office due to his increasingly erratic and authoritarian behavior. Leonid Brezhnev Alexei Kosygin then became the new leaders of the Soviet Union.
• In Czechoslovakia 1968 was the year of Alexander Dubcek's Prague Spring, a source of inspiration to many Western leftists who admired Dubček's "socialism with a human face". The Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August ended these hopes and also fatally damaged the chances of the orthodox communist parties drawing many recruits from the student protest movement.

China

• Relations with the United States remained hostile during the 1960s, although representatives from both countries held periodic meetings in Warsaw, Poland (since there was no US embassy in China). President Kennedy had plans to restore Sino-US relations, but his assassination, the war in Vietnam, and the Cultural Revolution put an end to that. Not until Richard Nixon took office in 1969 was there another opportunity.
• Following Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev's expulsion in 1964, Sino-Soviet relations devolved into open hostility. The Chinese were deeply disturbed by the Soviet suppression of the Prague Spring in 1968, as the latter now claimed the right to intervene in any country it saw as deviating from the correct path of socialism. Finally, in March 1969, armed clashes took place along the Sino-Soviet border in Manchuria. This drove the Chinese to restore relations with the US, as Mao Zedong decided that the Soviet Union was a much greater threat.

Mexico

• The peak of the student and New Left protests in 1968 coincided with political upheavals in a number of other countries. Although these events often sprung from completely different causes, they were influenced by reports and images of what was happening in the United States and France.

Middle East

• On September 1, 1969, the Libyan monarchy was overthrown, and a radical, anti-Israel, anti-Western government headed by Col. Muammar al-Qadaffi took power.

South America

• In 1964, a successful coup against the democratically elected government of Brazilian president João Goulart, initiates a military dictatorship of over 20 years of oppression.
• The Argentine revolutionary Ernesto "Che" Guevara travelled to Africa and then  Bolivia in his campaigning to spread worldwide revolution. He was captured and executed in 1967 by the Bolivian army, and afterwards became an iconic figure for leftists around the world.
• Juan Velasco Alvarado took power in Peru in 1968.

India

• In India a literary and cultural movement started in Calcutta, Patna, and other cities by a group of writers and painters who called themselves "Hungryalists", or members of the Hungry generation. The band of writers wanted to change virtually everything and were arrested with several cases filed against them on various charges. They ultimately won these cases. This span of the movement was from 1961 to 1965.

Source: www.wikipedia.com